The holiday season is nearly upon us — time for good cheer and merriment, right? Actually, it’s time for a lot of deception and bickering about money.

Based on a survey of 1,000 people, the McGraw-Hill Federal Credit Union found that fewer than 25 percent of couples never argue over holiday spending. The people most likely to say they didn’t argue much over it were unmarried — 42 percent of them said disputes were rare.

More than one-third of couples in all categories (divorced, heterosexual married, and homosexual married or committed) said they sometimes argued over gift-giving. About half use some kind of deception to hide purchases, CBS News says, with popular tricks including:

Paying with cash to hide their tracks (34 percent)

Opening a new credit card on the sly (31 percent)

Staking out the mailbox (14 percent)

Another 20 percent used some other kind of super-secret technique to hide their holiday purchases. Digging into previous research on holiday stealth tactics, CBS News suggests they might include leaving packages in the car trunk until the spouse is asleep, hiding packages in the closet for months, or outright lying — saying it was free or from someone else.

It's not the usual blah, blah, blah

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